'Galaxy Trucker' Board Game Adaptation Extending $4.99 Launch Price Until October 12th Posted: 06 Oct 2014 12:42 PM PDT Galaxy Trucker [$4.99 (HD)] got an iPad adaptation recently, and publisher Czech Games Edition has announced on our forums that the game's discounted launch price of $4.99 is being extended until next Monday, October 12th. This is an iPad version of the popular board game by Vlaada Chvatil, which involves players trying to build spaceships from spare parts like sewer pipes, the goal ultimately being to have more credits than other players at the end of the game, with different card tiles representing different ship parts and different events that can happen. The iPad version boasts 12 different AIs to play against solo, single-tablet play for up to 4 people, and both real-time and asynchronous play online, and no in-app purchases at launch.
Even at its eventual full price, consider that Galaxy Trucker at $7.99 is still a lot cheaper than what the game is going for on Amazon, over $50! And this version also lets you play online with people. I've seen how hard it is to arrange tabletop game nights. Getting a game of Galaxy Trucker together on iPads online seems a lot easier, and for $4.99 for an acclaimed board game, that's hard to pass up now. |
Upcoming 'Starband Troopers' is a "Rogue-like Musical RPG" Posted: 06 Oct 2014 11:00 AM PDT
We've seen a lot of cross-genre craziness on the App Store, but this has to take the cake. Just announced in our forums this morning, Starband Troopers is a cross between a rogue-like and a musical rhythm game. As explained by the developer: "It is a roleplaying game with a twist in the battle system using beat game mechanic. It is a sci-fi themed epic story with instruments and musics weaponized. It is also a rogue-like adventure and so every journeys are different!"
The above screenshot looks a lot like Elite Beat Agents and similar timed music tapping games. I've enjoyed those before, but often found them to be a little too shallow for my tastes. Adding rogue-like elements on top to give the game loads of depth? Now we're talkin'. If all goes as planned, Starband Troopers should be available before Christmas. |
'Reckless Racing 3' Brings Gymkhana to the Venerable Racing Series This Week Posted: 06 Oct 2014 10:30 AM PDT Pixelbite's Reckless Racing franchise is getting its latest entry this Thursday, October 9th, as Reckless Racing 3 hits the App Store then. The drift-happy top-down racer will launch for $4.99, boasting improved visuals and several new modes. The big new mode is Gymkhana, which has players racing powerful rally cars around obstacle courses as quickly as possible. Drift mode will be all about drifting around all the corners, all the time, with point bonuses for pulling off perfect drifts. Reckless mashup events will pit all kinds of vehicle types in all the game modes, making it possible to race cars, trucks, and buggies all against each other on the same track at once.
The game will feature in-app purchases, but Pixelbite claims they're optional for faster unlocks. There will be a total of 28 vehicles and 36 tracks, with gamepad support and customizable touch controls, the latter being one of the stronger parts of Reckless Racing 2 [$1.99]. There will be iCloud saves, and video sharing as well. This has been one of the better mobile racing series in the past, so it'll be interesting to see how this 2014 version stacks up to the competition once it comes out this Thursday. |
Attention Shoot-Em-Up Fans: 'Castle Of Shikigami' Has Hit The App Store Posted: 06 Oct 2014 10:00 AM PDT Fans of shoot-em-up games have had it good on iOS devices. Between arcade ports such as those from Cave, classic revivals from companies like DotEmu, and original efforts like Sky Force 2014, the library of titles is impressive in both its depth and breadth. Well, get ready to add one more to that list, but with a bit of a caveat. The classic bullet hell shooter from Alfa System, Castle of Shikigami [$5.99], has hit the App Store for the price of $5.99, but it's an untranslated version of the game, so everything down to the description in the store is in Japanese. Even with that in mind, fans of Cave's games, who might be a bit disappointed at the slowdown in their releases, should jump right on this since it's very much in the same vein. Originally released in Japanese arcades in 2001, English gamers got their first taste of this game with the budget-priced PS2 release that was stripped of its story scenes, retitled Mobile Light Force 2, and with a cover that looked like Charlie's Angels fan art. The second and third installments of the series, ported to PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii respectively, kept the original Castle Of Shikigami title and were more faithful to the Japanese versions. Like most shooters, this one has a special scoring system, based around getting as close to enemies and bullets as possible to boost your multiplier. The graphics are a mix of polygonal backgrounds and sprites, with the occasional polygonal boss to mix things up a bit.
This version of the game windows the action, leaving a fairly large area for you to put your finger on to control the action. It's important because more so than in many shooters, enemies in Castle Of Shikigami love to sneak up behind you. The controls will be familiar to anyone who has played one of Cave's iOS games, where your character automatically shoots while you move them around with your finger. Your character's bomb attack can be used by double-tapping on the screen. It's a very faithful port of the original game, and that $5.99 purchase gives you the whole game, without any IAPs to be found. It's hard to say if English language support will ever be added, but really, it's a shoot-em-up, so it's not like it's all that important whether you can understand the cut-scenes or not. With any luck, we'll see ports of the later games in the series follow. In the meantime, enjoy blasting weird Japanese demons with charm papers as you fly over the city of Tokyo. |
Upcoming 'Skip a Beat!' Uses Your Actual Heart Rate For Score Multipliers Posted: 06 Oct 2014 08:00 AM PDT A pretty crazy new game just popped up in our upcoming games forum called Skip a Beat!. As we've mentioned about a billion times now, the runner aisle of the App Store is falling in on itself there's so many different options to choose from. To get noticed, developers need to do something weird, and that's definitely what's happening here.
The gameplay seems sort of basic, but it uses a gimmick I'm not sure I've seen before- At least in a game. Your score multiplier is determined by keeping your heart rate in a specific range. You don't even need any fancy accessories to use this functionality either, it's apparently able to read your heart rate using the iPhone camera. Here's a video of how it works:
Who knows if Skip a Beat! will be a fun game or not, but I'm always at least willing to try a game that attempts to do something new. According to the developers, they're about a month away from launching… So stay turned. |
'Dragon Quest 3' Preview - Import Impressions Posted: 06 Oct 2014 06:59 AM PDT
Dragon Quest 3 is the third installment in the popular, long-running JRPG series. It's where the series, in Japan, went from being popular to being a part of the modern culture. Its popularity was such that there was an urban legend passed around for years that the Japanese government had passed a law banning Enix from releasing Dragon Quest games on weekdays due to everyone skipping work or school. That's not true, of course, but the government did jokingly suggest it, and that in and of itself is pretty noteworthy. More important than Dragon Quest 3's sales is its content, however. After the spartan experience of Dragon Quest 1 and the ambitious but highly flawed follow-up Dragon Quest 2, the team behind the Dragon Quest series finally hit it out of the park with this game. It's a big adventure with plenty of customization and just the right amount of non-linearity to make the player feel like it's their story. It makes excellent use of its world and has meaningful connections to the previous games, and although the story is very simple by today's standards, its main hook is still pretty powerful. This version of Dragon Quest 3 is a port of a feature phone remake released only in Japan in 2009. It was the third remake of the game, following on the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom version and the Game Boy Color version which was released in the US and Japan. It borrows the look of the 16-bit SFC remake along with most of the gameplay changes. If you're familiar with the GBC version, you'll probably be wondering where a few things went. The monster medals and the bonus dungeon from the GBC version didn't make the cut, and the opening animation featuring the hero's father along with the dice game from the SFC version are also out. The Zenithia bonus dungeon from the SFC version is still in, and you can now set your party members to be controlled by the computer AI if you're that-way inclined. The music has been replaced with orchestral arrangements, and unlike Dragon Quest 4 [$14.99], the tracks don't loop back to the beginning after every fight. All of the items that were originally only found in the dice game are now distributed through collecting tiny medals hidden around the world.
As I already mentioned, it visually takes after the Super Famicom version, except for a few details. Characters have had their heads redrawn to show their facial expressions a little bit better, and monsters no longer animate in battles, a particular disappointment since even the GBC version had nicely-animated enemy sprites. Unlike the ports of Dragon Quest 1 and 2, the sprites have been scaled correctly in this version of Dragon Quest 3, so that weird stretched look that made the pixels look a bit too obvious in those games isn't a problem here. It looks fantastic, and is probably one of the better attempts at carrying over 16-bit graphics that I've seen. The new music arrangements sound wonderful, and I hadn't heard some of these versions before, so that was a treat. The controls are set up similar to the other recent Dragon Quest releases on iOS so, apart from a few tricky navigational challenges around pits, the game plays really well, even one-handed. Unfortunately for those looking to play the games in landscape mode, this one is once again only playable in portrait mode. It's pretty much the same old Dragon Quest 3, and that's a great thing. If you haven't played it before and like JRPGs, feel free to start getting excited. It's still a great game and probably the earliest point in the series that doesn't feel terribly outdated in some way. I'm not sure if I like this particular version better than the GBC version, even with much better graphics, but it really only suffers by comparison. Taken on its own, this iOS version looks and plays great, and will instantly be among the top JRPGs available to English mobile gamers when it finally releases worldwide. I'm interested to see how Square Enix handles the new translation. Since the adventure spans a world based on Earth's map, there should be plenty of opportunities for the accent chicanery this series likes to indulge in of late. Sadly, we have to get through the somewhat less great Dragon Quest 2 in English first, but the wait shouldn't be too long. |
I've been working my way through the new iOS version of Dragon Quest 3 since it hit the Japanese App Store last week, and now that I've finally brought peace back to the land, I figured I would give you some deeper impressions about the game. This game has been confirmed for English release, though we don't have a date any more specific than within a few months of Dragon Quest 1 [
No comments:
Post a Comment